‘Unprotected’ online shoppers are conned out of £7billion a year

Shoppers are being ripped off £7billion a year but efforts to protect them have failed, a new report reveals.

Online shoppers are being conned out of billions every year (Picture: Stock image)

People are increasingly falling prey to problems involving online shopping, such as email scams or fraud using credit cards, MPs have said in a report.But the consumer protection system has failed to keep up with the developments.

Almost all consumer law enforcement is carried out by councils but abuses are increasingly at a regional level, where protection is âinadequateâ, said the House of Commons public accounts committee.

The governmentâs plans to abolish the Consumer Focus watchdog and scale down the Office of Fair Trading riskÂ reducing the ability to deal with scams.

The cross-party committee called on Vince Cable âs Department for Business to provide âa system fit for the modern eraâ.

Committee chair Margaret Hodge said: âConsumers are being ripped off to the tune of Â£7billion a year by sellers of defective goods, dodgy doorstep traders and online fraudsters. But the arrangements for protecting victims are incoherent.

âThe National Audit Office reports that consumers lose an estimated Â£4.8billion each year through regional malpractice.â

Just £34million was spent by central government on consumer protection at a regional and national level in 2009/10.

Local authority trading standards services are set to lose one-third of their budgets, from £213million in 2009/10 to about £140million in 2014.

âThe department has too little information on what the cost of protecting consumers is or how successful current interventions are,â said Lady Hodge.

In many cases, the potential profit from fraud can outweigh the maximum available penalty.